Highlights of Social Media for Nonprofits SF

And a reboot for the Craigslist Foundation Boot Camps

It’s hard to come up with a highlight tape from Thursday’s Social Media 4 Nonprofits conference in San Francisco, given the breadth of talent on stage and in the packed room. The most notable news was the announcement that Darian Rodriguez Heyman, the former executive director of the Craigslist Foundation, and Ritu Sharma will be reviving the recently defunct Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp, with a renewed focus on the nonprofit community. Darian announced that they hope to have the initial Boot Camp in March 2013 at Microsoft’s offices in Mountain View, with a second event in San Francisco followed by one in New York in 2014. Great news!

I managed to squeeze in a few hours at the packed gathering at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis on Thursday, so here are some photos of the event, a pointer to the tweets during the day and a few nuggets that stood out for me.

Libby Leffler, strategic partner manager of Facebook, mentioned the great grassroots organizing campaign by Water.org at give.water.org and another campaign by Socialblood. It’s an interesting use of the Facebook platform, even if the Socialblood site overstates it a bit: “Our mission is to connect the entire Facebook population of over 900 million users to their blood types.”

Guillaume Decugi, CEO and co-founder of the curation tool Scoop.it — a great startup for whom I’ll be the guest for their Twitter chat this Thursday — invoked marketer Brian Solis in saying, “Brands must become media to earn relevance.” Last year at this same event I told the audience, “Your nonprofit is now a media publisher, so you need to start thinking like new media publishers by creating content.”

Other highlights of SM4NP SF

A few other highlights from the day:

Check out CancerCommons.org, “bringing science to the patient, and patient insights to science.”

Small is good! “Out of 1.5 million nonprofits in the United States, 75 percent have budgets under $75,000,” Darian told the room.

Ritu mentioned two hashtag services for those wanting to know what hashtags to use when tweeting about a cause or topic: Twubs and tagal.us (which is down at this writing).

She also noted that scheduling a status update should be done through Facebook, rather than a third party service, because Facebook penalizes outside services when it comes to getting your posts seen by your fans.

Lesley Mansford, CEO of Razoo: “A fundraiser with a video typically raises four times more than those without one.” She also said the best nonprofit campaigns are often 30 to 45 days long — even better if it’s a competition with different players pitted against each other.